Subsidies and the Decline of the World’s Fisheries

Commentary by Jonathan Lash

Canadian researchers published an astonishing study in May. They found that all of the world’s large ocean-going fish – including tuna, cod, marlin, halibut, and sharks – have been decimated by overfishing. Examining a half century of data, back to the onset of large-scale fishing techniques in the 1950s, they found that the populations of all large ocean fish species have crashed, each reduced by more than 90 percent.

This destruction is no accident. For years the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and some conservation groups have warned of the effects of overfishing by high-tech fishing fleets. Yet, neither the fishing industry nor governments have been able to impose meaningful limits. The new study, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Nature, outlines a cycle of destruction – each new species targeted by fishing fleets have been reduced by 80 percent in just 15 years.

At the core, this is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons – each fishing fleet competing to harvest as much of the common resource as quickly as possible until it is depleted. The factors driving the fishing industry to undercut its own livelihood are numerous. Fisheries have been poorly managed, and governments have allowed fleets to fish without giving populations a chance to recover. Technologies, from long-line fishing to sonar and satellite-based global positioning systems, allow vessels to easily target and deplete fish populations. In addition, there are simply too many fishing vessels and too few fish – the global capacity of the fishing industry is 140 percent the level that would be necessary to sustainably manage catch from fisheries.

Not only have governments failed to take meaningful actions to slow the destruction of the ocean’s large fish, many have promoted it by subsidizing fishing fleets to the tune of billions of dollars each year.

That’s right. Taxpayers from Japan, the European Union, the United States, China, Korea, Canada, Indonesia, and a number of other major fishing nations concerned about jobs and competition have been paying cumulatively $10 - $15 billion dollars every year to support a bloated fishing industry, according to estimates from the FAO. All told, subsidies may account for more than 25 percent of the $56 billion global trade in fish.

Industry tax write-offs, ship-building assistance, job supports, fuel rebates, and a host of other fishing-industry tax breaks have artificially sustained more fishing vessels than the oceans can sustainably support, according to a 2001 review of global data on fishing subsidies by the World Wildlife Fund.

Japan, the largest subsidizer of fishing fleets, provides $2 to $3 billion annually to its fishing industry for capital and infrastructure investments, insurance, and tax deferrals and credits. Russia, which once had the largest fishing fleet in the world, pays $600 million annually to help scrap old ships and replace them with modern trawlers. The United States spends nearly a billion dollars on fishing industry subsidies each year, including a $150 million tax rebate on diesel fuel for fishing ships.

Eliminating these billion-dollar handouts and using the funds to help fishing communities adapt to new management realities would go a long way toward alleviating pressure on beleaguered fisheries.

History has shown us that there are two ways to resolve the type of tragedy of the commons dilemma that is facing the ocean fisheries: assert stringent regulations over the resource, or give individual users control over the resource and provide them with a stake in preserving it.

In the case of ocean fisheries, both of these approaches are needed. And some progress has been made. Fish catch for some fisheries is now controlled by industry-mandated quotas. And governments at the World Summit on Sustainable Development last year committed to rebuilding fish stocks by 2015, and a handful of countries – Japan, the United States, and Spain – have begun to reduce the size of their fleets.

But unless governments drop their massive subsidies and further reduce the capacity of their fishing fleets, it is unlikely that the ocean’s fisheries will get a chance to recover. (WRI Features, 657 words)